Found the Toyota CEO.

Unfortunately capitalism will keep killing things that are good for the environment while we spend 7 trillion subsidizing fossil fuels.

And transportation... and production...

Ironically hydrogen works well as a storage solution for the variability of wind and solar. When you have a large excess of them, you can run electrolyzers to generate green hydrogen. And then when the grid needs some more supply, we can use that hydrogen to make up the gap.

Did you mean "steal"?

It isn't going to overtake electric cars, too inefficient.

But it might be the future for airplanes, which need a lot more energy density.

It also requires dedicated infrastructure. EVs can have charging stations at basically anywhere with a power hookup (or a genset. A grocery store here puts small VAWTs to charge off of in their parking lots. And every new-ish building has added charging stations to some of their spaces.

Hydrogen cars would need refueling stations with dedicated pressurized gas hookups, tanks, and fill machines. And the tanks and the tankers to keep the tanks full.

Finally the ultimate problem is it’s rather low energy density.

Something else no one has said yet (I think) is that most hydrogen is produced from natural gas, so this is in no way a climate solution. It's been sold as one and it's bullshit.

Why do you think it'll overtake electric cars? The energy efficiency of hydrogen cars is significantly worse, as they introduce some extra steps in pipeline of energy-generation -> movement.

The only major advantage they have is "ICE-like" fuelling, which has a bunch of major caveats attached to it (as in: it's nowhere near as simple a system as ICE refuelling. Everything from generation, to transport to getting-it-in-the-car is way more complex and thus expensive and error-prone).

I dunno, everything I've always seen on it made it seem like a hyper-specific solution that's more suited to a few edge cases that could have their specific infrastructure.

For the average consumer, the recharging of EVs is actually Not A Big Deal™️. It seemed like one at first. Now all it does is ensure I take hourly short breaks which I should have been doing anyways, basically. The only big upside of Hydrogen is the ability to refill very quickly, but you pay with a whole bunch of downsides like inefficient generation, inefficient transportation, secondary infrastructure, energy inefficiency, etc.

They're still electric cars at their base. They just use a hydrogen reactor in lieu of a battery to power the motors.

I don't see a future where hydrogen supplants electric cars, unless there's some revolution in storage technology for it. In that case, progress in battery tech is more likely.

Same problem with gas waaaaay back in the day.

Another problem to the already mentioned ones (expensive, expensive dedicated infrastructure needed) is the range. Hydrogen is not very energy dense. For example the Toyota Mirai has a range of 500 km (310 miles) and its a pretty big, fuel-efficient car and the fuel storage is as big as the vehicle allows it.

So while you can refuel faster than electric, you need to do it more frequently and its less convenient.